1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an apparatus for melting and diffusing materials to produce a homogeneous mixture. More particularly, this invention relates to a machine adapted to transform materials into glass disks or solutions.
2. Description of Prior Art
In 1956, I have discovered a technique for the preparation of samples that increases the accuracy of X-Ray fluorescence analysis up to one hundredfold. That technique consists in heating a mixture of a sample and a glass forming flux at sufficiently high temperature, until the mixture is completely fused, agitating the molten glass until it is homogeneous and pouring it into a mould to obtain a solid glass sample of desired shape. In 1974, I invented a machine for automatically carrying out the operations involved in the above method. This machine was patented in Canada under Canadian Pat. No. 1,011,556 and in the United States under U.S. Pat. No. 4,045,202. In these Patents, I pointed out that rapid mixing during fusion is necessary in order to obtain homogeneity of the glass within the shortest time possible. The reason is that high accuracy of analysis may not be obtained if the heating time is too long because this may lead to an evaporation of the elements of the original sample and the elements constituting the flux. In that patented machine, a rapid mixing was obtained by rapidly moving the crucibles containing the heated mixture. That motion is back and forth, left and right, up and down in a complex fashion. Since the overall motion would normally bring the crucibles outside the flame of the gas burners used as a source of heat if the burners would be fixed relating to the crucibles in motion, it was necessary to move the burners together with the crucibles so that the crucibles remained in the flame at all times during heating. In other words, the efficient mixing of the molten glass was primarily the result of fast complex displacements of the crucibles.
Other machines were built by others to apply the sample preparation fusion technique that I have invented and to my knowledge, presently there is no other machine which is available in which the crucibles move fast enough to ensure an efficient mixing of the sample and of the flux. It is very doubtful that the solid glass disks produced by the presently available machines are homogeneous unless the heating time is substantially longer than with my first machine.
In 1977, I obtained French Pat. No. 7734641; German Pat. No. 2,757,706 and British Pat. No. 1,527,321 for a machine of similar type, but that can pour the molten glass into a beaker containing an acid to obtain a clear solution after a short period of agitation.